Tunisia politician warns against delaying elections

Rached Ghannouchi, leader of main Islamist party in Tunisia, says former elite is trying to ‘escape the ballot box’ The gains of the revolution in Tunisia could be lost if the election is further postponed or disintegrates amid politically inspired violence, according to the leader of the country’s largest party. Rached Ghannouchi, the leader of al-Nahda, the main Islamist party, warned that the deferral of polling day – from 24 July to 23 October – may not be the last postponement, and the staging of an election at the start of the academic year and at a time of student protest and workers’ strikes could present an opportunity to foment chaos. He described the postponement as an attempt by parties who had cohabited former president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali’s dictatorship to regain their posts. Ghannouchi, who returned to Tunisia in January after more than 20 years in exile, said: “They [the former elite] are trying to escape the ballot box. Those whose weight is low do not want to stand on the scales.” As it is, al-Nahda and the leading liberal faction, the Progressive Democratic Party, have made compromises to keep the electoral process on track in the hope that the democratic transition was more important that the result. Al-Nahda agreed reluctantly to the deferral of the election, after all other parties accepted it, but they are not confident the reasons stated are genuine. “There is now talk of organising presidential elections, or amendments to the constitution and organising a referendum, or turning this Council for the Achievement of the Aims of the Revolution into a parliament, which would promulgate rules,” Ghannouchi said. “Actually it is doing this already, before the election of the constituent assembly, which shows that this assembly for some people is an undesirable thing.” In an interview with the Guardian, Ghannouchi said he was proud that the uprising in Tunisia had lit the flame that ended the long Arab night, but warned that for this reason the election in Tunisia was being keenly watched in Egypt. It is due to hold its own parliamentary elections in September, but has yet to decide voting rules or electoral boundaries. There are no dependable opinion polls on what will happen to the 80 political parties in Tunisia. Ghannouchi said the dominant representative of old political elite was the Ettajid party, the former Tunisian socialist party for whom his party was enemy No 1: “They have no confidence in their ability to compete with al-Nahda. Hence they seek one postponement after another,” he said. “Placing the date of the election at the start of the academic year could be a cause for postponing them again, because we have seen great instability and unrest with the student and worker movement.” Ghannouchi believed that the revolution was irreversible: “The Tunisian people have liberated themselves and will never accept a new dictator, under any name, Islamic or any other. “But there is a fear of chaos if the transition period is long and the country loses time.” Tourism has halved and unemployment doubled since the uprising. Life for most Tunisians was harder now, but, he said their smiles were wider. “They feel confident and on a psychological level we can already see this boost,” he said. “There are fewer road accidents, lower rates of divorce, and fewer people going to psychiatric clinics. Tunisians feel more hopeful of the future and there is more social solidarity and cohesion.” But the Islamist leader was bitter about the transitional government’s pusillanimous attempts to deal with the legacy of dictatorship. Transparency International put Ben Ali’s personal wealth at $5bn (£3bn) and his family’s at $12bn, which together is the size of the government’s budget. Ghannouchi said the interim government was putting more effort into seeking crippling foreign loans than it was in recovering its own stolen assets from banks abroad. This week the ousted president and his wife were sentenced to 35 years in prison and fined $66m after a trial in absentia for embezzlement and misuse of public funds. Ben Ali and wife Leila Trabelsi fled to Saudi Arabia, which has refused to extradite them. But the former dictator has yet to be tried on criminal charges of murder and treason. Ghannouchi, who returned to a hero’s welcome after his years in exile in London, heads the most liberal Islamic party in the region. He said he was confident of his party’s ability to function in a pluralist multiparty democracy. “When the electoral law was being discussed, the demand that half of each party list had to include women candidates was expected to cause us Islamists embarrassment,” he said. “It did the opposite, because we were able to mobilise more women into our movement in rural areas than any other party could do.” Tunisia Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali Arab and Middle East unrest Africa Islam David Hearst guardian.co.uk

Posted by on June 23, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.